Hello Dotti, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 4 critique.

Starting with your organic forms there is something to call out, it seems you did one page of contour ellipses, though the assignment was for both pages to be contour curves. Not a huge problem, but it does suggest that you may want to be more attentive when reading through the instructions.

You're doing a pretty good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, and drawing them with smooth confident lines.

I can see you're starting to shift the degree of your contour curves, though you seem reluctant to push them past a certain width, so keep experimenting. You can see a good example of how to vary your contour curves in this diagram showing the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived.

Moving on to your insect constructions, it is worth noting that the assignment for this lesson calls for 4 pages that are purely constructional with no texture or detail, but your lobster construction is the only page with no texture. In this case it's not a big deal, but please make sure to read the assignments carefully and follow the instructions as closely as you can in future.

Overall your work is coming along well, and many of your constructions demonstrate that you're understanding the forms you draw as existing in a 3D world, and not just as 2D shapes on a flat piece of paper.

I do have a few points to discuss that should help you get more out of these constructional exercises in the future.

The first of these relates to differentiating between the actions we can take when interacting with a construction, which fall into two groups:

• Actions in 2D space, where we're just putting lines down on a page, without necessarily considering the specific nature of the relationships between the forms they're meant to represent and the forms that already exist in the scene.

• Actions in 3D space, where we're actually thinking about how each form we draw exists in 3D space, and how it relates to the existing 3D structures already present. We draw them in a manner that actually respects the 3D nature of what's already there, and even reinforces it.

Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose, but many of those marks would contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.

For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

For example, I've marked on your crab in red where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn.

We can also accidentally flatten the construction by extending off existing forms with one-off lines or flat partial shapes. As discussed in this section of lesson 3 altering the silhouette of forms in this manner only really works for forms that are already flat, such as leaves or insect wings.

On this section of your beetle construction I've marked some more examples of cutting back inside forms that were already on the page with red, as well as some examples of extending with partial shapes in blue, which doesn't quite provide enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space.

So, when we want to build on our construction or alter something we add new 3D forms to the existing structure. Forms with their own complete silhouettes - and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene. We can do this either by defining the intersection between them with contour lines (like in lesson 2's form intersections exercise), or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure as shown here.

This is all part of understanding that everything we draw is 3D, and therefore needs to be treated as such in order for both you and the viewer to believe in that lie.

You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo. You can also see some good examples of this in the lobster and shrimp demos on the informal demos page. As Uncomfortable has been pushing this concept more recently, it hasn't been fully integrated into the lesson material yet (it will be when the overhaul reaches Lesson 4). Until then, those submitting for official critiques basically get a preview of what is to come.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you tried out lots of different strategies for constructing legs. It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, but to decide that the legs they're looking at don't actually seem to look like a chain of sausages, so they use some other strategy.

The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.

Now the last thing I want to discuss is in regards to your approach to the detail phase, once the construction is handled. I can certainly see that you're putting a great deal of effort into this aspect of your drawings, and making careful observations of your subject matter. There are a few aspects I noticed where you could be following the guidance for approaching texture as introduced in the texture section of lesson 2 a little more closely.

• On your tarantula you've got more black present on the black sections of the fur than the orange sections, when if we think about the forms that are physically present, the texture is the same, whether the fur is orange or black. Imagine your subject has been painted all one colour when approaching texture in this course.

• On this ant it looks like you're using hatching to create form shading, which as discussed in this section we do not use in this course.

• On this redback spider it looks like you may be filling in form shadows (where the form turns away from the light) rather than focusing on cast shadows (where one form blocks the light from hitting another surface) so I'd like you to watch this video which explains how to differentiate between form shadows and cast shadows, and why we focus on cast shadows for texture in this course.

In effect, there are places where you're getting caught up in decorating your drawings (making them more visually interesting and pleasing by whatever means at your disposal - usually pulling information from direct observation and drawing it as you see it), which is not what the texture section of Lesson 2 really describes. Decoration itself is not a clear goal - there's no specific point at which we've added "enough".

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that. In particular, these notes are also a good section to review.

All right, I've covered 3 main points to work on, but your underlying spatial reasoning skills are coming along well, so I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Please make every effort to apply the feedback here (and refer to the diagrams and demos I've shared with you) as you tackle your animal constructions (where the points I've discussed will continue to be just as relevant) so that we can build upon them in the next lesson.